


give way to better

by nymja



Series: the unkindest cut: mandalorian wars duology [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic (Video Games)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Forgiveness, Getting Back Together, Grief, Healing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reunions, Sequel/Companion Story, Set during KOTOR 2, Vignette, Yikes., You: Invent a planet killer, Your girl: Kills a planet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:43:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27585604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymja/pseuds/nymja
Summary: She knows him. He’s not Revan. He doesn’t see things like her. Everything is personal. His presence in the war is personal. He whistles and sings to his droid. He smiles, almost shy, when he talks about planets far away--silently willing her to choose one.Using the Mass Shadow Generator will destroy him.Bao-Dur can’t do this. She can’t let him do this.--Spin-off/Companion story toi loved rome moremusic playlist
Relationships: Bao-Dur/The Jedi Exile, Meetra Surik/Bao-Dur, one-sided Atton Rand/Meetra Surik, one-sided Mical/Meetra Surik
Series: the unkindest cut: mandalorian wars duology [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2016463
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	give way to better

**Author's Note:**

> spin-off from my fic i loved rome more because i felt like it! i think you can read this as a standalone and there's no problem, just roll with an established relationship. this'll be short, 5-6 chapters ish.
> 
> enjoy!

**prologue.**

It’s too hot for blankets, and yet they lay in a messy pile of sweaty limbs. The humidity of the jungle is almost suffocating. A heavy weight that makes her fidget and her skin stick to whatever it presses against. She doesn’t sleep well on Dxun. No one does.

And so she isn’t surprised when she feels his thumb trace over the round of her shoulder. His skin is rougher than hers, both from the thick calluses and the natural texture of the Iridonians. She leans into the touch, rolling on her side in order to curl into him. Her cheek rests against his chest and she watches the thin patterns of tattoos as they rise and fall with his breath. He hums gently, and presses his lips to the top of her head.

She’s in love. And it’s absurd. Because tomorrow they charge together into a suicide mission. Bao-Dur will be in the engineer corp tasked with dismantling the anti-air turrets. And Meetra will be on the front lines, with the numbers very much against them. She thinks of the soldiers who volunteered to join her in the charge-- _ her  _ soldiers. And guilt twists her stomach so intensely she would rather focus on anything else.

So she tries.

“What are you thinking?” She asks softly. 

Because he’s always thinking, his quiet manner part of what drew her to him in the first place. When she was bright-eyed and he didn’t yet know how to hide the festering, bottomless anger he carried with him since the death of his family. His  _ planet.  _ She can’t imagine it, can’t picture the courtyard of the Enclave collapsed into itself or the gentle grass of Dantooine’s plains reduced to ashes. She hopes she never has to. She’s  _ here  _ because she hopes she never has to.

His voice is equally quiet. “Revan asked me for something.”

“Before we left?”

His hum echoes in her ear. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

Meetra tenses. She loves Revan, too. In a different way than she loves Bao-Dur, but just as unreasonable. But she also knows Revan. And Bao-Dur admitting defeat in the face of a puzzle or problem is not like him.

“What did she ask?” 

He shakes his head. The hand on her shoulder moves down to rest comfortably on her hip. His palm is a welcomed weight against the exposed skin where her tank has risen up. “Go to sleep, General.”

She frowns at the title. He only used it in two moods: when teasing...and when purposefully distant. 

“Bao-Dur.”

“Yes?”

“Tell me if we survive.”

He considers. “I will.”

-

He doesn’t. Because in the aftermath of Dxun, after losing nearly half of her personal forces, Meetra forgets that she ever asked.

-

After she watched her friends charge a minefield and use their bodies to shield her as they were ripped apart, Meetra finds an empty storage container. She sits in a small corner, draws her knees to her chest. Her body still smells like them-- ignition fuel and burned hair. Her skin is tight and raw underneath the dozens of bacta patches that kept her alive because her friends were dead and she  _ failed  _ them. 

Meetra’s chest aches. It’s expanding. She feels too much and she needs release or it’ll cave in on itself. And when the pain is too much, she screams. She screams until her voice runs hoarse. She screams their names and when she does, Revan’s words echo in her mind.

_ This is your victory.  
_ _ This is  _ your  _ victory.  
_ _ This is  _ yours.

Outside the container, careful to be out of sight, Bao-Dur closes his eyes and tilts his head back as he leans against the metal wall. 

He isn’t ready to tell her. Because if he does and it fails, he doesn’t know how to live with misplacing her hopes.

Bao-Dur will tell her once he figures it out. After he understands how a machine can draw the darkness around it, ripping it away from the galaxy once and for all.

\--

She volunteers for more suicide missions after Dxun. Charging into front lines. Commandeering Mandalorian ships in battle and risking friendly fire. Bao-Dur watches it happen, unable to do anything but work faster, to stay up through several night cycles and experiment with wires and cores.

He is on his fourth night without rest when he makes a foolish mistake. 

His omni-tool slips. He doesn’t have time to deactivate the core that is fueled by  _ feeding.  _ The pain is unbearable as his upper arm disconnects from the flesh of his shoulder, but then it goes shock-white, and Bao-Dur doesn’t understand what’s happened until he sees his arm lying on the floor, fingers still twitching.

\--

Meetra turns down a mission that she says is reconnaissance, but he knows is an assassination, in order to sit beside him as he builds his new shoulder. Bicep. Forearm. Fingers. She patiently hands him the tools he needs, at times using them in his stead. 

She doesn’t know that his new arm works by gravity. That it’s a disrupter and a way for him to further his prototypes. That he considers his arm a fair trade for learning a way to pull matter into a controlled vortex.

Because he knows it will end the war. And he knows the end of the war will resolve everything. He will avenge his colony, his parents, his younger sister. He will keep Meetra. It will end. It will all end and they’ll go somewhere new. Start over once all the Mandalorians are dead.

Meetra gently presses her fingertips against the center of his new palm. Hesitant and ready to hear bad news. “Is it working?”

“Soon,” he whispers with a promise she can’t understand.

His remote lets out a low keen near his head, before returning to its rounds.

\--

Three weeks later, Bao-Dur tells her about something he’s calling the Mass Shadow Generator, and her entire body is cold at its description. What it can do. 

But her mind switches quickly from his lover to his General. “Does Revan know?”

He frowns. “Not yet.”

“Don’t tell her.”

Bao-Dur stares. “It was an order.”

Raw panic fills her. “She’ll  _ use  _ it.”

For the first time in a while, she sees his anger. Feels it reverberating in the air around him. “It’s meant to be used.”

“Bao-Dur-”

Disappointment’s in his gaze. “I have work to do.”

“ _ Don’t _ ,” Meetra begs.

Instead of an answer, he half-heartedly kisses her cheek before leaving her behind.

\--

She paces. Tears at her hair. She knows Bao-Dur. He’s not Revan. He doesn’t see things like her. Everything is personal. His presence in the <i>war</i> is personal. He whistles and sings to his droid. He smiles, almost shy, when he talks about planets far away--silently willing her to choose one.

Meetra thinks of the charge on Dxun. The short cries of her friends as they crumpled at her feet.

Using the Mass Shadow Generator will destroy him.

Bao-Dur can’t do this. She can’t let him do this.

Meetra sits alone in their room, fingers folded behind her head as she stares at her boots and tries to level her breath.

\--

He tells her. And shortly after, Revan tells Meetra the orders she will follow in his stead.

\--

Bao-Dur watches her, and she senses his vindictive happiness as his thumb hovers over the trigger for the thing that will kill them all. Meetra knows it’s because he believes this will heal his pain, and so she can’t hate him.

“General?” He asks, hopeful.

She wants to sob. To hunch over and scream like she did after Dxun. But now she’s a General, and he’s nothing but a tech. And a General doesn’t cry to a subordinate.

Meetra steadies her breath.

“Do it.”

He does. It’s so simple. His artificial thumb flicks up, there’s a short snap, and Meetra knows she is damned for this.

“I love you,” she says quietly as she watches a purple-black circle bloom far outside of their ship.

As if for the first time, he seems to sense her pain. “Meetra,” he begins, confused. “It’s over.”

The circle expands. She braces her hands against the railing of the bridge. Meetra doesn’t know how it works, but she knows what this will do to her. How her connection to the Force is Revan’s opposite, and she is about to swallow the echoes of this design.

“Meetra,” he says again, gentle and concerned. He reaches out for her.

She has just enough time to step away before everything within her  **tears.** As she feels her chest finally collapse like it’s been promising to for so long, since she first stepped on Alek’s ship.

“Meetra-!” 

But she’s not Meetra anymore. She’s not anything.   
She’s gone.

\--

When she wakes, it’s in a medical bed. There is a chair next to it, pulled slightly like someone has just stood from it. A mug of the caf she knows Bao-Dur loves steams on an end table. 

Methodically, she peels off the discs, the sensors keeping track of her vitals. Everything from her is stripped, leaving her hollow. Her body moves on its own, every nerve in her body numb.

She wants to die. She deserves to die.

Meetra leaves the medbay before Bao-Dur returns from wherever he shortly left to. She boards the first cargo ship she sees. And she goes to Dantooine, because no one will hate her more than Dantooine. No one but Malachor, and Malachor is gone.

\--

Bao-Dur returns from finding another medical droid for Meetra not even five minutes after she leaves. He runs the halls, calling out for her. At first he thinks she’s been taken--kidnapped by one of her thousands of enemies. Then he thinks she walked away to get help, to find out what had happened. 

After that, he has no answer for why she’s disappeared.

The cold that will take over him for years begins as he stares at her rumpled sheets in their old room. It grows when he sees that his messages to her are never read. And it controls him as he stares at Revan, watches her and Alek walk in a parade on Taris celebrating their victory. That Meetra-- _ her  _ friend,  _ her  _ General--is all but forgotten. 

Whatever fire of anger he carried with him after Malachor retreats into embers.

\--

Two months after she’s disappeared, he accepts that he’s been left behind.   
That she is not coming back for him.  
She’s not coming back for anyone.


End file.
